The panel on justice in Jesuit legal education sparked a lively conversation earlier today. John Breen laid out his argument that Jesuit legal education as currently practiced is a failure because Jesuit law schools rely on clinical opportunies as a fulfillment of their mission. This is problematic, according to John, because justice in the clinic is something felt, not something thought. Jesuit law schools need to offer students training in the Catholic intellectual foundations of the commitment to justice, and a required jurisprudence course would help fill the void. John believes that currently Catholic identity is viewed as an additive to what a university already does, like icing on a cake. Instead, the Catholic identity should be viewed as the air in the balloon, and this requires a more explicit and deliberate intellectual exploration of justice.
Greg Kalscheur, S.J. resisted John's characterization of Jesuit legal education as a failure, emphasizing that justice is a virtue, a quality of character that disposes us habitually to see the world in a certain way. Adding a course to the curriculum will not make justice a reality for students. While Greg welcomes a jurisprudence course (I think), he prefers a stronger commitment to push students to think deeply about the sort of people they will become as lawyers, which has a lot to do with the questions we ask them (or don't ask them). For him, the pursuit of justice in our training of law students should focus on finding ways to relate to each other that are more open to recognizing the sacredness of the human being.
Amy Uelmen, as moderator, echoed the emphasis on student formation; much of the problem, in her view, is the lack of personal/professional integration occuring in law schools. In this regard, she sees the mission being advanced by a professor willing to model the integrated self to her students, even if she does not make religion an explicit part of that modeling.
Rob
Thursday, March 30, 2006
As readers of this blog have learned, I enjoy tracking signs of convergence between evangelicals and Catholics. Today over at the leading evangelical blog, Joe Carter explains his view of the Gospel in terms that will likely sound much more familiar to Catholics than to his fellow evangelicals:
[B]iblical passages such as John 3:16 or Ephesians 2:4-6 are often referred to as “the gospel in a nutshell.” By referring to these verses we can provide a simple summation of the “gospel”, allowing us to “witness” to those with short-attention spans. But as life-altering, world-shatteringly important as those verses are—and I cannot overemphasize just how good that news is for us---the gospel cannot be squeezed into a “nutshell.”
Indeed, the entire universe is not large enough to contain the good news about Jesus! The gospel is more than just news for fallen man. Even if there were no anthropos or no cosmos the seraphim would still proclaim the good news about Christ. The gospel is greater than just the redemption of fallen human nature, greater than the redemption of all creation. The gospel is not about me and it is not about you. The gospel is the news in toto about the Savior, Redeemer, and Sustainer of creation: Jesus Christ.
The most serious threat to the gospel is, therefore, the attempts to limit the gospel about Jesus to a propositional truth, to a narrative, to a story, to a verse, a book, to a Bible, or to a million other “nutshells.” True, the gospel is contained in all of those forms. But any attempt to share the gospel that does not proceed from “the gospel is…” to “but the gospel is also…” is simply inadequate. Even if we were able to proclaim all the news that is contained in those nutshells, though, it would not exhaust the good news about Christ.
Rob
Via Open Book, an update on the Spokane diocese's bankruptcy proceedings (free registration req'd):
"I'm very concerned, obviously, about the fact that frankly every month this debtor goes further and further in the hole in terms of cash," U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Patricia Williams said during a hearing this week.
"That's a fact of life that is getting worse every single month and I ask myself periodically, you know, how many churches are we going to have to sell just because we can't get to plan confirmation?" Williams said.
Rob
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Joseph Bottum reports on the continuing saga of Baylor's apparently abandoned effort to become a premier research institution with a meaningful Christian identity. An interesting backdrop for this week's conference of religiously affiliated law schools.
Rob
The Tablet has an interesting article (registration req'd) on an early unpublished work by Karol Wojtyla criticizing, but not completely dismissing, Marxism. Over at dotCommonweal, John McGreevy asserts that the article:
points us to one answer to Mark Sargent’s query about Catholic liberalism and its future: Catholic liberalism as on display in Commonweal remains committed to engagement with the various political and intellectual traditions that swirl around us, not merely the preservation of Catholic thought from alien invaders. Engagement does not mean capitulation, although this is always one risk. Instead it means approaching the world a bit like the young Karol Wojtyla, ready to listen as well as to proclaim.
Rob
